Lincoln Monuments

Begin by resisting a wave of adulation in the deluge of books occasioned by the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, a bicentennial celebration that follows by only a few weeks the inauguration of America’s first black president. We can appreciate the symbolism of Barack Obama’s decision to be sworn in on the Great Emancipator’s Bible, but we need not canonize Lincoln as our “secular saint,” not just murdered but “martyred.”

His is a life more worthy of detailed study than dutiful reverence. Fortunately, in the dozens of biographies and histories published in the 200th year since his birth, we have excellent new ways to tunnel through the mountain of myth that, even generations ago, had been built around his contradictory personality. His gentle humor and love of anecdotes were overcast with bouts of what was then called “the hypo” or melancholia.

Though a member of no church, Lincoln meditated profoundly on the inscrutable justice of God. Though a family man and a forgiving soul, he refused to attend his own father’s funeral. And despite his modest protestation that he was controlled by events, the best of the Lincoln literature of our time reveals that his strong-willed decisions were ­driven by the unwavering political purpose of his life.

That declared purpose was not to abolish slavery, though he privately abhorred it and campaigned before the Civil War to oppose its expansion westward. For two long years into our national fratricide, he repeatedly disavowed emancipation as his goal because that divisive issue might defeat his overriding purpose: to establish the principle of majority rule in the world’s most daring experiment in self-government by insisting that the whole country abide by the results of its national election.

For someone who wants to brush up on Lincoln, or who feels an urge to introduce a young family member to the practical world of democratic idealism, where best to start? How do potential Civil War buffs get a handle on what can become an enriching, lifelong enterprise?

Before we dive in, a perceptive overview is helpful. James M. McPherson, whose “Battle Cry of Freedom” (1988) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and is the most readable short history of the Civil War, has just written an introductory biography, Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University, $12.95) — only 79 pages, a speedy narrative but no superficial treatment. McPherson cites an example of Lincoln’s skill in molding what he called public sentiment.

In the month after Lincoln took office, Confederate leaders demanded withdrawal of the federal garrison from Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. William Seward, the former political rival Lincoln had chosen to be secretary of state, and several other cabinet members urged the president to give in to that demand in hopes that it would preserve the peace and dissuade other slave states — especially Virginia and Maryland, which surrounded the District of Columbia — from following South Carolina’s lead in seceding. Lincoln’s dilemma: Withdrawal from the fort would show a weakness likely to encourage foreign countries to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation. On the other hand, by sending a shipload of United States troops to shoot their way in to reinforce the garrison at Sumter, Lincoln would be blamed by many in the North — especially those who did not believe the cause of abolition was worth civil war — for choosing to start a bloody conflict.

“But Lincoln hit upon an ingenious solution,” McPherson writes. “Instead of sending troops, he would send only provisions — ‘food for hungry men.’ ” The new president sent a message of assurance to the governor of South Carolina “that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms or ammunition, will be made.” Of course, Lincoln was aware that Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, could not accept that seemingly peaceful gesture of sending only food, because that would appear to cede sovereignty of the port to the Union. Davis ordered Southern guns to fire, thereby suffering the blame for starting a war. As Lincoln had figured, his move not only helped keep European nations from recognizing the Confederacy but also united the divided North.

Manipulative? Of course. That was Lincoln, in his first major presidential decision, pursuing his strategy of preserving the Union at all costs to ensure the relatively untested experiment in majority rule. As George Washington had been indispensable to independence, Abraham Lincoln was indispensable in seeing that independent Union through its existential test. That is why historians keep digging into both their lives, especially that of the more recent and complex Lincoln, for fresh revelations.

Today’s buff-to-be needs the story of a life in a single, well-regarded, hefty but manageable book. What’s the best one-volume “life” in this generation? McPherson recommends A. Lincoln: A Biography, by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, $35), as “the best biography of Lincoln since David Donald’s ‘Lincoln’ (1995).” White’s major new work does cover all the bases, adds newly discovered papers, explores the religious angle and may well be the best “since” the best. But no one-volume life published so far beats David Herbert Donald’s perceptive and lucid work (still selling in trade paperback). When supplemented with a pictorial dimension now provided in Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon (Knopf, $50), by three members of the Lincoln-steeped Kunhardt family (with a foreword by Donald and an introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin), such a combination of Donald text and Kunhardt illustration is enough to ignite a lifelong interest in the era that reveals the most about our history.

Most who are beginning that worthwhile journey are probably not ready to undertake Michael Burlingame’s two-volume, 2,000-page, million-word Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University, $125), a magisterial enterprise by a historian whose mentor was David Donald. (A surprise to me: Burlingame is convinced that the famous letter of condolence to the widow Bixby for the loss of what was thought to be five — in fact, two — of her sons was written by John Hay, one of the president’s aides.) It is not likely to be soon overtaken in scope or timeliness, however, because it is scheduled to go online in the spring at www.knox.edu/lincolnstudies. This version, the author promises, “will be updated as mistakes are discovered and new information comes to light.” (Think of that: a “life” that never ends.)

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Illustration by Christoph Niemann

To get a glimpse of Lincoln’s mind actually at work, peruse the official publication of the Library of Congress’s Bicentennial Exhibition, In Lincoln’s Hand: His Original Manuscripts With Commentary by Distinguished Americans, edited by Harold Holzer and Joshua Wolf Shenk (Bantam, $35). It contains photos of the original manuscripts of many of his most famous letters and speeches — often with his handwritten editing, bringing to life his second thoughts — with brief commentaries by 43 modern contributors. My own assignment in that collection was to examine his editing of his first Inaugural Address, delivered after some states had seceded but before the war had begun. The new president promised “my dissatisfied fellow countrymen” of the South: “The government will not assail you unless you first assail it.” (Italics his.) But just before delivery, he took Seward’s toning-down advice, and drew a line though the bellicose caveat “unless you first assail it.”

Removing that provocative phrase was wise. He also agreed with Seward about what had been the final, challenging words: “Shall it be peace, or a sword?” He scrapped that hard line, too, and we can see in Lincoln’s legible handwriting the way he reworked his key adviser’s suggestion of a much more fraternal final paragraph.

Seward’s draft of a peroration began with a stark “I close.” Lincoln changed that to a poignant “I am loth to close,” as if he hated to tear himself away from his audience. (That was an early spelling of “loath.”) His longtime rival from New York came up with lines about “mystic chords” that could harmonize their ancient music “when breathed upon by the better angel” — Seward crossed out the word “better” in his own submission and concluded with “the guardian angel of the nation.” That would have been a most acceptable prose peroration.

The incoming president then took up that musical metaphor and, in a stunning revision, transformed it to poetry with an image of the chords produced by strings of a celestial harp: “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave . . . will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” That was some memorable editing.

A publishing industry chestnut is that the three fields readers are most interested in are (1) Lincolniana (2) medical books and (3) books about the care of pets; therefore, one surefire best seller would be “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.” Joking aside, we have a mountain of bicentennial works, many slicing and dicing influences on all the phases of his life and death: relationships with his wife, his admirals, his great and terrible generals, his law partners and secretaries, and supporters and contemporaries, from Frederick Douglass to Stephen A. Douglas — and an account of his escape from assassination in Baltimore on the way to inauguration.

In the blazon of this bicentennial biographical bonanza, several new books are of special interest to readers with a literary bent: one is The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy From 1860 to Now, edited by Harold Holzer (Library of America, $40). (Besides coediting the aforementioned “In Lincoln’s Hand,” Holzer is also the author of last year’s “Lincoln President-Elect” and the writer or editor of more than a score of other works on his favorite subject.) Contemporaries in “The Lincoln Anthology” who observed the Civil War president include Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne (“His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an insalubrious atmosphere around the White House”), the humorist Artemus Ward and the class-struggling correspondent Karl Marx. (“Hesitant, resistant, unwilling, he sings the bravura aria of his role as though he begged pardon for the circumstances that force him ‘to be a lion.’ . . . Nevertheless, in the history of the United States and of humanity, Lincoln will take his place directly next to Washington!”) Modern perspectives are supplied by the poets Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz (“Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!”) and novelists from Irving Stone to E. L. Doctorow.

But what of books not being written about our 16th president? I’d like to see an anthology of “Lincoln’s Greatest Mistakes — or Were They?” One chapter: Why did he arrogate to himself the power given to Congress, not the president, to suspend habeas corpus in case of rebellion — banishing the war opponent Clement Vallandigham, preventing Maryland’s legislators from voting for secession, censoring The Brooklyn Eagle and other peaceful dissenters in areas where the courts were functioning? (Defenders’ comeback: the challenge to national security was unprecedented, requiring a commander-in-chief “to think anew and act anew.”) Why did he publicly disavow any intention of abolishing slavery when he had a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in his desk drawer? (An answer: Putting abolition first might have divided the North, led to a negotiated peace and neither preserved the Union nor freed the slaves.) Why did this humane leader, undoubtedly sensitive to suffering, replace the ­casualty-avoiding Gen. George McClellan with a Union general willing to accept and inflict huge casualties to destroy the rebel army? (Reply: He had sworn an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution, and nobody realized at the outset it would cost more than a half-million lives in a population one-tenth of America’s today.) Why did he draft a letter on Aug. 24, 1864, to Henry Raymond, editor of The New York Times, instructing him to “obtain a conference for peace with Hon. Jefferson Davis” — and then decide not to send it? (Reply: It might have split the North, helped the Democrat McClellan defeat the Republican Lincoln’s bid for re-election, probably leading to peace negotiations and a 19th-century two-state solution.)

In that regard, how about another controversial publishing project: “What Would Lincoln Do?” Look ahead a generation or two. For argument’s sake, say that the illegal immigration issue has not been resolved, and a majority of voters of states in the Southwest, feeling inundated and isolated, are moved by a demagogue with a rousing message of secession. If cool reason doesn’t work against such unabashed sedition, do you go to war to preserve the Union?

Or project a different crisis: if today’s moral issues of abortion or same-sex marriage become as nothing compared with the fury of people in the heartland over an explosion of the cloning of human beings in the Northeast and West Coast — as well as the rage of post-Internet bloggers, echoing the Civil War media giant Horace Greeley, who is supposed to have said “erring sisters, depart in peace”— do you dare enforce majority rule at the point of a gun? Or what if a tax-shackled “Generation No” rebels against paying entitlements guaranteed to its grandparents? Or if some new ­human-rights holocaust is raging while the rest of the world turns away, and a defiant majority of one section of the United States point-blank refuses to participate in unilateral American intervention — do you, as president, defer to that national minority?

Never happen, we assure ourselves; such dire scenarios are as alarmist as a notion of global economic collapse leading to Great Depression II. But daring to think such unthinkable thoughts helps put us inside the mind of a president who chose to lead the nation through what he called, in his 1862 letter to Eliza P. Gurney, the “fiery trial” of civil war (his reference to martyrdom in 1 Peter 4:12). Times change; faced with the choice of “peace, or a sword,” we might not do what Lincoln decided to do; a Lincoln reincarnate might choose otherwise. But by exploring his thought process — sifting the evidence in books and whatever future electronic platforms give us access to his motives and actions — our descendants will be better able to deal with wrenching decisions to come.

Through the nation’s most agonizing crisis, he kept the Union indivisible. He held fast to the majority rule that affirmed the ideal of popular government, which he believed must also lead to the end of human bondage. From examining his shrewd move in molding public sentiment at the approach of hostilities to appreciating his close attention to the weight of each word in his inaugural addresses, we teach ourselves and his successors the hard lessons of political power and moral leadership.

Let us, then (he liked that construction), not wallow in worship of a statue looking gravely down on multitudes from a marble monument engraved with famous lines. The way to honor the hero who did most to force us to stay united is to absorb the ever-better histories that illuminate Lincoln’s character, his humanity, his genius in expression and, above all, his sure grasp of high political purpose.

William Safire, a former Op-Ed columnist for The Times, writes the On Language column in The Times Magazine. He is the author of “Freedom,” a novel of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Lincoln Monuments. Today's Paper|Subscribe